running subversion as non-root

Running subversion as root works fine, but under user 'svn' I get a load of
permission problems, e.g.
/usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: Cannot open "/usr/local/lib/apache2/libaprutil-0.so.9"
I fixed this by adding svn to group wheel, but am not sure if this is 'the
right way'.
Is there a standard solution to this?
tia,
Cerion